Self-Serve Query Letter & Chap 1 Contemporary Fiction

Greetings!

Learning to Limbo (100K words), is a playful, big hearted tragicomedy in the Russo/Irving mold that chronicles the misadventures of middle-aged Jack Irwin and his family as they bounce across the country in search of gainful employment, domestic tranquility, and a few people they can trust. It is a story that working parents past, present and future will see as part of their own: the triumphs, the tragedies, the innocent mistakes and the not-so-innocent mistakes, and above all the forgiveness that keeps families together to face another challenge. If you know how to limbo, you can get through anything.  

Synopsis

According to the history books, The Limbo Dance originally developed on slave ships as men tried to squeeze under the low beam that separated them from their women below decks. Like those men, Jack Irwin, a middle-aged, 12-month-unemployed family man, finds himself in a 21st century version of that same tight spot.

When Jack’s parental gravy train derails, he is forced to take a low

paying marketing gig in the low cost Midwest, leaving native Norcal behind. A month after settling in Indianapolis, they're moved to New England, the nerve center of BFC (Big Fat Corporation) where Jack is lured into a French-style "stress-relief" relationship with sex-crazed poodle-haired exec. Meanwhile wife Carrie has gotten embroiled in a nasty email scam. Eventually incriminating photos wind up in her husband’s hands.  

The tightest of the tight spots? Not by a mile. Jack gets implicated in a revenue reporting scandal and is terminated. The affairs come to light. Jack gets crabs, Carrie gets paralyzed. Son Robbie flunks out. Only 11-yr old Lulu knows how to save the family with her ownversion of the limbo: the happy hop.

Background

I've been in the business of writing my entire career, both agency and client-side.  My debut novel, Hack, was represented by John Galvis Literary Agency and published by HD Media Press in August 2012. My business and corporate satire is gaining steam on The Huffington Post and other sites, along with a steady stream of quirky humor. I'm looking for a long-term partner that is interested in creating great, timeless fiction in the tradition of the classic storytellers. More on about.me.

Sample below. I think you'll want to read the manuscript - I have a feeling  Learning to Limbo is right up your alley. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jeb Harrison

www.jsh-creative.com

Learning to Limbo

Part 1 – San Anselmo

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Jack go unda limbo stick

All around the limbo clock

Hey, let's do the limbo rock

Limbo lower now

Limbo lower now

How low can you go?

Chubby Checker – The Limbo Rock

Chapter 1 – In a Tight Spot

[Which describes the condition and profession of our infamous and odoriferous hero John Henry Irwin the III.]

Jack Irwin parked his rustbucket diesel Rabbit as far away from the lobby of Luna Microsystems as he could, hoping the long walk across the parking lot would allow his odor to dissipate. He had driven all the way from San Anselmo north of the Golden Gate through a bone-chilling January mist with all the windows and the sunroof open, down 19th Avenue past San Francisco State University and onto 280, where he floored his rusty bunny in hopes of generating a purifying hurricane that would leave him springtime fresh by the time he checked in for his interview. At age 43, a year on unemployment, with wife, requisite two kids, dog, mortgage, car payments, computer payments, insurance premiums, orthodontist bills, cable bills, bills of every shape and size, and a blossoming addiction to prescription painkillers, Jack was in a very tight spot. The last thing he needed was to asphyxiate his would-be employers.

Just three hours ago body odor worries were far from Jack Irwin’s mind.

His sleep was restless, as it had been since the layoff from the start-up that didn’t start-up a year ago,

and, as usual, wife Carrie had kicked him out of bed for his nocturnal spasms. So he had spread his long, banana-slug frame across the stained, child and dog-worn living room sofa, praying that the monkish one-note hum of the SubZero would quiet the bellicose cacophony of thousands of fast-talking recruiters half his age telling him what to say at tomorrow’s job interview and pulled a misty blue cashmere throw under his chin. The full-body sweats had finally passed, and he had poured nearly a quart of cold vanilla almond milk down his parched, smoke-ravaged throat by the soothing refrigerator light, letting the cool air blow softly over his drenched pajama top. Finally he stretched out on the sofa in the dark living room.

He was just drifting off when the alarm went off upstairs. He threw off the cashmere blanket and jumped up. “Shit,” he growled, rushing for the stairs, then stumbling over their slobbering, spastic yellow Labrador retriever, Barney, named by his 7-year old daughter Lulu after the famous purple dinosaur.

            
"Jesus...fuckin' dog!" growled Irwin, shoving Barney out of the way. He heard Carrie groan in the bed upstairs as the alarm continued to beep, and pictured her pulling the down pillow over her head as she had with reliable consistency all fifteen years of their marriage. Irwin dare not disturb Carrie before her designated wake up time lest she unleash a lethal swarm of killer bees or some other pestilence upon the household.

Alarm squelched, Irwin rushed downstairs and stood aside as the dog raced for the door, then dove into the cold January darkness to terrify whatever remaining nocturnal woodland creatures might be about. He grimaced as the dog squatted over what remained of the lawn, a hopeless patch of anemic fescue that perhaps Robbie, his nine year-old beamish boy, would someday learn to mow. Maybe Carrie would attend to Barney’s morning contribution before he came home and stepped in it.

            Sure enough, Carrie Irwin had her pillow in a death grip over her sleepy, frizzy-haired head. "God, Jack," came her muffled voice from underneath the pillow. "What time is it?"

 "Six AM, Thursday, January 12,” he announced as if to remind himself that it was big interview day.

“I gotta be outta here in 20 minutes." He rushed into the bathroom, quickly ran the electric razor over the graying stubble on his dimpled chin and wide, square jaw, then contemplated trimming his thick, wiry gray-flecked eyebrows, decided against it and jumped into the shower. He vigorously shampooed what was left of his rapidly receding sand-colored hair and whitewalls, resisting the usual urge to linger under the warm stream and soap his itching hemorrhoids. Instead, with a silly little TV jingle phrase gotta go, gotta go racing around in his head, he pulled on the corporate uniform: Nordstrom boxers, Ralph Lauren socks, Polo khaki slacks and Polo oxford blue shirt. He was working on his standard-issue red power tie when he heard the dog gouging another deep groove into the front door; grabbing his penny loafers, he bounded down the stairs and flung it open.

It wasn't until Barney had rushed in, skidded across the hardwood floor, and stood wagging in front of the cabinet that held the dog treats that Irwin smelled it: unmistakable, powerful skunk, so strong it made his eyes water. "Fuckin' A!" he muttered in a hoarse whisper, shutting the door, figuring Barney had chanced upon Mr. and Mrs. Skunk doing the wild thing in the bushes and had received a double shot of skunk lovin’.  He turned, woozy, and stumbled across the living room to the kitchen, expecting the smell from outside to dissipate. Instead, the smell was equally strong if not stronger in the kitchen.

Irwin took one look at the dog and groaned—he could practically see the odor wafting off his golden fur, like the hind end of Pepe Le Pew in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Irwin grabbed the stinking pooch by the collar, dragged him across the floor and shoved him back into the dark, nearly chopping off the tip of his golden tail as he slammed the door behind him. The dog turned and began gouging the door with renewed vigor, peeping like a maligned bird.

"What's that smell?" Carrie Irwin stood at the top of the stairs in her nightie, disheveled but still a distractingly ravishing sight to Irwin, even with his brain burning at five alarms. A few extra pounds had made her curves more pronounced, her luscious lips and cheeks a touch fuller; her almond-shaped hazel eyes more inviting.

"Barney got skunked," he said, marching up the stairs.

"Ugh!" grunted Carrie Irwin, squeezing her nostrils shut, crawling back

in bed and cocooning under the covers. "Disgusting," Irwin could hear her mutter as he walked past to retrieve his standard navy blazer.

Outside Irwin noticed that the skunk smell, though still strong, was not as strong in the chilly morning

air as it seemed to be in the house. He was closing the front gate when Barney came racing up, smashed open the gate and made a run for it. Irwin tackled, wrestled, grabbed the collar. Just when Irwin thought he had the dog, he slipped his head out of the collar and tore down the street. Standing there with the empty collar in his hand, Irwin didn’t even try calling after him.

Now, in the parking lot of Luna Microsystems where he was interviewing for a mid-level managerial position in the academic sector, Irwin checked himself in the rear view mirror, ran his fingers through his silver sidewalls and sighed. There was a new crack in the dashboard - a result of Magic Fingers relentless rattling - and he made a mental note: that was at least 67 cracks that he could count, which he did frequently.

 He heaved his aching 220 lb. six foot frame out of the tiny vehicle and shook himself all over like a wet, freshly skunked dog, his arms shimmying like spaghetti noodles by his side, tongue wagging, gut jiggling like the proverbial bowl-of-jelly in the weak winter sun. After a short time he noticed that a couple of workers had paused to observe his little St. Vitus' dance, so as he walked through the parking lot he threw in a couple of "happy hops", a sort-of Teaberry Shuffle that he and the kids broke into when feeling particularly silly, or in the current context, particularly fed up with the absurdity of being 43 years-old and interviewing for positions that required half his experience.

But the happy hop, for Irwin, wasn’t always mere silliness, rather, just like his St. Vitus warmups, had lately become disguised expressions of existential desperation – a physical manifestation of a psychological Houdini act where he figuratively shed his shackles and wriggled out of, squeezed under or hopped over, a sticky situation; often times to land smack dab in the middle of another, even stickier quagmire. So, just as he was about to enter the lobby of Luna Microsystems he threw in a subtle hop, like an extra sprinkling of Pixie Dust, partly for good luck and partly to ensure he was limber enough to run if things got ugly. Then he straightened his power tie and opened the big glass doors.

Irwin’s purity of purpose was blown to bits when he saw the receptionist falling out of her blouse. He imagined working around women like…like that. Who was harassing whom when the receptionist’s breasts practically jumped out and shook your hand? he thought.

He had just finished signing in when the receptionist gave him a queer look, wrinkling up her nose as if

Irwin had just passed some particularly noxious gas. Irwin attempted a smile and it struck him that perhaps the everlasting odor of Pepe Le Pew still clung to him like a cloud.

"Hi," he said. "I'm here to see Dinesh Singh."

The girl winced, and Irwin hoped that it was because she might have a little gas herself. "Please have a seat. I'll ring him for you."

                        
Then it was: "Hello," said a chocolate-colored Indian fellow with gleaming teeth. If he smelled anything unusual he was gracious enough not to let it show.

Irwin followed the young man through an incomprehensible maze of cubicles, extending almost as far into the distance as his increasingly blurry vision could discern. He was making yet another mental note to make an appointment with an eye doctor when he noticed that most of the cubes were empty. Irwin wondered what had happened to all of the former inhabitants.  Why couldn’t they have filled this job with one of those folks?

“All right then, my friend,” said Singh, clapping his brown hands down on the desk. “Do you have any questions?”

And so Irwin interviewed.

At first with a tall, middle-aged thin turkey buzzard of a man with yellowing skin who thought something was rotting in his trash can.

Then with a compact, broad-shouldered, thick-mustachioed Super Mario Brother who apologized for having too much garlic in his eggs that morning.

And with a very young, pudgy, rosy-cheeked girl with a garter belt collection of all sorts and sized adorning the rim of her cube and photographs of newly married couples on every available inch of desk space. She wondered if one of the garter belts was getting a little ripe.

Then Irwin met Abdul Abaya who had a big round table in the middle of his spacious office at the end of the hall, with a large window overlooking the bay to the north.

"Ah, welcome Mr. Irwin. Please have a seat. I have been so looking forward to meeting you!" Irwin felt flush, surprised by the sudden curiosity in his capabilities.

“Well, it’s another dry day out there, isn’t it?” he said, swiveling around to the wide window overlooking the serene silver water. The winter thermal inversion had turned the air around the Bay Area into thin layers of taupe haze. The “no burn” policy had been in effect all through the Christmas holidays, angering many Bay Area residents who insisted that you couldn’t have Christmas without a fire in the fireplace. “And no rain in the forecast, is that right?” Abaya added.

“Yes,” Irwin said.

Abaya swiveled back around. “I just hope there’s enough water left in July for my tomatoes.” Irwin nodded and was gearing up to talk about gardening when Abaya stood and gestured to the various pieces of marketing literature he had laid out on the table.

“Well,” he pronounced, “As you can see our problem is not tomatoes.” He waved his hand across the

piles of literature that looked as if they might have come from several different companies. “We need someone to get a handle on this mess.”

Then he stopped and sniffed the air like a dog, nose twitching uncontrollably. "Do you smell skunk? I smell skunk. Don't you?"

Before Irwin had a chance to answer he was on the phone to building services complaining that a skunk must have gotten into the ventilation system somehow. Then he dialed each of his direct reports and they all admitted that they smelled something odd and noxious, so he dismissed the team for the day, ended the interview, and started packing up his things.

And thus it was over. 

Irwin took a couple of deep breaths to loosen the growing constriction in his chest, then looked around and realized he had no idea how to find his way back to Dinesh Singh's office, much less find his way out of the building. After several panicky minutes walking up and down the corridors between the cubicles he found an exit sign, made his way to the lobby, took a final look at the receptionist's heroic cleavage, walked across the parking lot without a single happy hop, got in his rusty long-eared bunny buggy, engaged the diesel reverberation engine, and headed home through the hazy city.  

_________________________________________

Git 'er on der Kindler fer $2.99 ratnow!

Saul Bellow: The Polka in The Bathroom

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Viking Press 1961

It was about this time last year that I read/listened to The Adventures of Augie March. It was an inspiring experience because in many ways what Bellow does with Augie’s voice, similar in some ways to what Walker Percy does with Binx Bolling,  is very much what I’m after in The Healing of Howard Brown. Both voices are so completely natural and honest in their portrayal of thoughts and actions that I got the feeling that I was in a darkened parlor with a roaring fire listening to the characters tell their story.    

Like Augie, Moses Herzog has a distinct voice, different of course in that Herzog the novel is sometimes narrated in third person, and also dramatically different in tone: Augie is brash, confident, optimistic and agreeable; where Herzog is defeated, taciturn, lost, angry, and confused to the point of doubting his own sanity; exactly how we might expect a guy who’s wife has been fucking his best friend then kicks him out of his own house to feel.

In Herzog Bellow plainly draws from current experiences in his own life, which may be one reason the novel has such authenticity, honesty, and raw power. Obviously not all writers use real events and people in their lives to fuel the creation of their fiction, but the parallels between the real events of Bellow’s own life and Moses Herzog’s story are in plain view:

“At its heart is Bellow's profound shock at discovering, a year after his separation from Sondra, (Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) her affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. The last of their circle to know he had been deceived, Bellow lapsed into deep depression and produced an intensely self-justifying hero who was tearful, cuckolded, and utterly humiliated. Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual is essentially precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of his marriage.” (www.saulbellow.org - The Saul Bellow Journal)

Reading Herzog I got the feeling that Bellow was to some degree engaged in an act of literary catharsis

as a form of therapy. Moses Herzog is an intellectual at work on an academic analysis of Christianity and The Romantic Period, and he has something to say about the writings of every philosopher in history. Herzog’s compelling need to view his own suffering in the context of historic philosophical ideas is almost comic given that the primary source of his suffering (to use a term that Bellow might have employed were he writing today) is pussy. He can’t live with it and he can’t live without it, and Bellow makes it clear that all the philosophical salve in the world can’t comfort the cuckold, even if Herzog deserves to be cuckolded, or perhaps because Herzog deserves to be cuckolded.

If there is one strong similarity between Augie and Herzog, it’s their mutual vexation with the opposite sex, and many more recent critics often consider Bellow’s treatment of women misogynistic. If the mean spirited portrayal of Madeline in Herzog is any indication of Bellow’s own attitude towards women - and we might assume that it is given his own real-life relationship troubles over the course of five marriages - we have a classic example of art imitating life. But to be distracted by these accusations of misogyny, regardless of how old-fashioned Bellow’s troubles with “broads” and admissions that they wield a mysterious inscrutable power that is impossible to rationalize, is ultimately a waste of time. And while a feminist might say “sure you can say that because you’re a man”, there are messages of hope and redemption in Herzog for both men and women that far outweigh the protagonist’s indictment of his ex-wife.  

When Moses Herzog reflects on his attempts to balance his desire to be a “marvelous Herzog” in the context of the betrayal that has just befallen him, the flip-flop in sentiment and subsequent anger is portrayed so naturally we can’t help that Bellow was simply recording the way he felt about his own messed up situation:

“...but this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas. What if he failed [at being a marvelous Herzog]? Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality? Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeleine would never have married such a type. What she had been looking for, high and low, was precisely an ambitious Herzog. In order to trip him, bring him low, knock him sprawling and kick out his brains with a murderous bitch foot. Oh, what a confusion he had made - what a waste of intelligence and feeling!” (p. 93)

We might guess that the author has experienced such anger directly in his own life, given it’s power and sincerity. Would an author who had been happily married and had nothing but pleasant, smooth relationships his whole life be able to conjure such emotions? Is it the ability to portray such feelings without necessarily having felt them what separates the great authors from the not-so greats? Could Bellow write this novel from Madeleine’s point of view? I doubt it.  

In Herzog, Bellow takes aim at the negativity and pessimism of the great thinkers and intellectuals: Shapiro, Banowitch, Hobbes, Freud, Dewey, Whitehead, Nietzsche, Heidegger Spengler, Darwin, Rousseau and more. I wonder if Bellow took to the old books in an attempt to soothe his own roiling heart, and, discovering no comfort there, used his experience to create Moses Herzog. Herzog’s summarized reaction to his own analysis of these thinkers and Rousseau in particular is spelled out forthrightly:

“We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

At the core Herzog is simply appealing for humans to start treating each other with compassion and empathy, to “repent” for having employed pain, to get our heads out of a “suffering” mindset and into one of illumination. This kind of message, delivered in the context of Herzog’s almost archetypal tale of betrayal and personal redemption, is what makes Herzog one of Bellow’s greatest novels.

If we were to simplify an imagined approach to writing fiction into a formula, it might seem that Bellow would periodically take stock of his life, then examine his experiences and thoughts in the light of various famous philosophies with the consistent intent of debunking them. Part of what makes Bellow work is exactly his ability to blend the ideas of the supposed great thinkers in with the everyday thoughts and events of everyman, particularly everyman in a state of moral crisis.

For example after a long description of Madeleine and Herzog’s dismal failure to work together

in restoring the house in Ludeyville, Herzog doing all the work himself to save money while Madeleine spends like a drunken sailor on unnecessary junk and bounces checks all over the place, Herzog reflects:  

“[Herzog] appeared to know how everything ought to go, down to the smallest detail (under the category of “Free Concrete Mind,” misapprehension of a universal by the developing consciousness - reality opposing the “Law of the heart,” alien necessity gruesomely crushing individuality, un-soweiter). Oh, Herzog granted that he was in the wrong. But all he asked, it seemed to him, was a bit of cooperation in his effort, benefiting everyone, to work toward a meaningful life. Hegel was curiously significant but also utterly cockeyed. Of course. That was the whole point. Simpler and without such elaborate metaphysical rigmarole was Spinoza’s Prop.  XXXVII; man’’s desire to have others rejoice in the good in which he rejoices, not to make others live according to his way of thinking - ex ipsius ingenio.” (p.123)

Herzog’s intellectualism and his tendency to use this or that philosopher’s credo to justify his own behavior is, I think, a double-edged sword.  While it expertly puts some rather dense thoughts into digestible layman’s terms, as in the passage above, it may also alienate those readers who have a thin, cursory knowledge of the great thinkers, or remember their names but not their work (like me.) If the reader has never heard of them there are long passages in the novel that would make no sense at all. In a sense Bellow has over-intellectualized Herzog the man as to make a dimension of him inscrutable to the average guy, which is unfortunate because the plot around what we would recognize as  one common version of The Midlife Crisis is entirely accessible and relevant. Then again the literati are apt to eat it up. So when I read that Herzog was on the NYT Bestseller list for almost a year I was surprised. I certainly don’t recall my Mom and Dad discussing it with their friends over Friday night cocktails. (Then again my Mother, from Chicago, was blatantly anti-semitic and my Father, from the south, had never met a Jew.)

But then Bellow brings Moses down from the mount to the bathroom to prepare for dinner with Ramona:

“He tuned in Polish dance music on the small transistor radio on the glass shelf over the sink, and powdered his feet. Then he gave in for a while to the impulse to dance and leap on the soiled tiles, so of which came free from the grout and had to be kicked under the tub. It was one of his oddities in solitude to break out in song and dance to do queer things out of keeping with his customary earnestness. He danced out the number until the Polish commercial ...He mimicked the announcer in the ivory yellow floom of the tile bathroom - the water closet, as he anachronistically called it. He was ready to go for another polka when he discovered, breathing hard, that the sweat was rolling down his sides…” (p. 158)

Aha! The intellectual is a private dancer! To polkas. In the bathroom no less! Adding this dimension to Moses Herzog is, as they say in business today, a “game changer.” From here on out we might begin to look at Moses in a slightly brighter light.

Listening to the audiobook version of Herzog is challenging because it can be difficult to distinguish between the first person narration of the protagonist’s letters versus the protagonist’s thoughts, also in the first person, versus the third person narrator’s telling of the story. It’s no problem on the page; the letters are all in italics. The narrator of the audiobook, Malcolm Hillgartner, makes a perfect Moses Herzog and a hilarious Sandor Himmelstein, and he handles the other characters beautifully. He makes a very subtle shift between Herzog’s letter writing voice and the voice of his thoughts, but it’s easy to mix up who’s who as you listen to the story. After listening to several dozen audiobooks that last few years, this is the first instance where I would recommend reading vs. listening.

But on the page Bellow gets away with jumping back and forth from first to their person with such subtle agility, it makes me wonder why they didn’t hire two voice talents just to keep the narrator and Herzog distinct. Here’s a small passage that exemplifies the seamless, punctuation-less transition from first to third and back again. And Bellow moves the POV around like a game of catch all through the novel.  

(The italics are mine - used to delineate Moses and the narrator.)

“I don’t blame him, thought Moses as Taube slowly and lengthily described her ailments. Papa couldn’t bear such an expression on the face of his youngest son. I aged. I wasted myself in stupid schemes, liberating my spirit. His heart ached angrily because of me. And Papa was not like some old men who become blunted toward their own death. No, his despair was keen and continual. And Herzog again was pierced with pain for his father.”  (p. 253)

Unlike the volumes and volumes of criticism written about each of Bellow’s novels (there are over 200 critical essays regarding Herzog alone on www.saulbellow.org, aka The Saul Bellow Journal) I look at Bellow’s writing as his way of facilitating the examination of these big emotional upheavals for the primary purpose of making peace with them and putting them into a workable context. But I came across an abstract that made me feel like a hack literalist that is completely unaware of the subtle nuance of Bellow’s complex, multi-tiered art. Consider this intellectual’s interpretation:

"Argues that H employs discourses that center around disease, beneath which lies a racialized, specifically black, discourse. Argues that Bellow is not simply a racist writer, but rather one for whom the outside world can only be experienced through his own Holocaust experience. Hence racial blackness in the novel accentuates his introspective tendencies and causes him to be interested in little else. In H, Moses suffers from the disease of the single self. The invisibility of racial blackness in literature does not always denote an absence. Moses carries within himself the power of blackness which threatens to engulf him. Jewishness and blackness carry connotations of disease. As a romantic novel, His pitting the disease of his Jewish cerebral activity against the healing power of black sexuality. This is playing two stereotypes against each other. Given its proper historical and cultural dimensions, blackness may, after all, cure the disease of the single self."

Varvogli, Aliki. "'The Corrupting Disease of Being White': Notions of Selfhood in Herzog." Saul Bellow Journal16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 150–64.

Well. I guess that kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? I think if Saul Bellow were alive today, an abstract like that just might do him in. But at least he would die laughing. 

Don't be a bum
Go on and goose that thumb!

Don't be a cow

Go on and buy that baby now!

Time, the Avenger (or The Curious Case of the Chrome Codpiece)

All righty this here will be the last limbo blast of this godforsaken year; the final flapper when the fat lady lets her bottom sing an aria like no other, giving OhThirteen a final and definitive "whoosh" into eternity. 

As far as New Year evolutions go, I've been instructed to shut up about my aches, pains, existential nightmares, apocalyptic visions, hemorrhoids etc. if I expect to have any friends at all, and I suspect this is good advice. But, as Alice so wisely observed before she popped that LSD-laced biscuit between her rosy lips, "I often give myself good advice, but I very seldom follow it." Anyway I thought I would give it a try. The LSD-laced biscuit, I mean.

That said, as I was tripping my brains out the other day (oh not really I mean jeez an acid trip at this late stage of the game would prolly be a one way ticket to Napa) I met the most enigmatic, twisted, reptilian motherfucker I've ever seen. I was stretched out in my beach barcalounger down in front of the castle at Stinson, and even though it must have been 70 degrees as it has been the entire second half of December I had on my old navy blue down parka, Pivettas, a flannel and 501s, my filthy hair pasted back under a Giants cap, my Vuarnets held together with Scotch tape, a fifth of Skye in my one of my jacket pockets and a carton of Marlboro reds and a foil of crack in the other. I guess you could say I’ve been having a high school flashback for the past couple of months, but strangely enough it’s not MY high school flashback. Instead I’m pretty sure it’s the late Scott Colburn’s, Mark Menzell's or one of the Barich brothers. I suspect my charade as a seventies stoner playing hooky from auto shop class is what caused this odd fellow to plop down on the sand beside me, pull the vodka bottle out of my left parka pocket and a pack of Reds out of the other - I could only watch, not only completely drunk but now equally dumbfounded. He took a long pull on the sapphire blue Skye bottle - the most tempting bottle of booze I have ever seen with it’s promise of crystal blue persuasion spilling over my inflamed and throbbing cerebral cortex - then shook a stick out of the fresh pack and lit up. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Happy New Year to you too,” I said with a slur that I couldn’t control.

He just continued staring out on the high noon diamond studded Pacific, smoke billowing out of his furry nostrils. After another long pull he said "I don't go much for numerical measurements that mark the passage of time. New Year's being a prime example, right up there with birthdays, anniversaries, memorials, and just dates in general."

I took a long look at him: not your typical beach bum by any stretch in his rhinestone lederhosen, propeller beanie, knee high moccasins and chrome codpiece. Being accosted by such an outfit might normally send me scuttling over to the Sand Dollar for a cup of coffee and a shot of crank, but when this odd little fellow passed the bottle back to me, I froze. 

"You see," he continued, picking tobacco from his tongue, "numbers, measurements, calculations...all pure inscrutable abstraction in my book. What real difference do these measurements make in a life? Do we subscribe to them so we know how to feel, how to act, what to wear, what to say, what music to play, what songs to sing, what colors to don? Of course we do, for without them life would be chaos, wouldn't it?"

He suddenly gripped my leg with his rubber gloved hand. "WOULDN'T IT?"

But I was already far beyond complete catatonia. While he caterwauled against the existence of time, I couldn't help but watch his eyeballs roll around in his sockets like marbles swirling down a funnel and his tongue dart in and out, in and out as if to snare a passing insect. And he couldn't have been more than four feet tall!

As far as I could tell, all was chaos with or without numerical markers. But sitting there as I was in the exact same clothes Scott Colburn or Mark Menzell might have worn to the beach on this absurdly globally warmed New Years Eve day, I felt an upwelling of joyous agreement, a profound yearning to be a member of this enlightened club of humans unfettered by the whims of the calendar and answering only to the movement of the non-numerical sun around the globe; to the turning of the leaves and the great migrations of the fowl; the flow of the tides under the spell of their lunar master; the rhythms of their lungs and beating of their hearts. Who were these enlightened, arithmetic souls that roamed the planet in rhinestone lederhosen and chrome codpieces? Where could I get such a cool outfit? Did they make them for full grown humans?

And then, as if to remind my new friend and I that the rest of the world in their stinking ignorance were

still slaves to time as measured out in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years...a earsplittlxngly loud horn atop a fifty foot tower, loud enough to blow a million walls of Jericho to dust, blanketed the beach, the lagoon, the multi-million dollar homes in Seadrift and the little shotgun shacks in the village, the soft-serv snack bar, Ed's Superette; all of it, buried in sound for an entire 30 seconds.

"Ah, well, so much for your escape from the big fat motherfucking clock, eh dude?" I said, chucking him on the...but wait, there was no shoulder to chuck, for my new best buddy had fled, high speed waddling through the sand like the famous TV midget Dr. Loveless at the blowing of the five o' clock whistle. I jumped up in hot pursuit, my Pivettas flying over the sand, shouting "hey, what the fuck, man!" just like James West might have, and it wasn't long before I caught up to the mind-bending midget.

"Hey, what's the big deal?" I said once I had the little monkey pinned. "I thought you had liberated yourself of numbers, your pure abstraction, your enslavement to the clock!"

His eyes were rolling furiously, tongue darting in and out like a lizard.

"Of course!" he hissed. "But there's only three hours and 58 minutes until I have to ring in the New Year, so let me go!" he cried.

"Wait," I said, trying to get a fix on his spinning face, "you're telling me that you...a midget in rhinestone lederhosen, knee high moccasins and a chrome codpiece...you are Father Time?"

"Yes, you idiot! But I won't be for long if you don't let me go! I can't be a nano second late, or the entire universe will be...OFF SCHEDULE!"

And with that the little turd squirmed out of my grasp, just as a Blackhawk helicopter appeared overhead, stirring up clouds of sand, seagulls, snowy plovers, harbor seals, Dungeness crabs, great white sharks, migrating gray whales and oil tankers. Then a rope was cast from the copter, Father Time grabbed on and was swept up in a clouded instant and before I could clear my eyes of sand and grit he was gone, headed no doubt for Times Square where, behind the scenes, he would direct Angela Sotomayer, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, on the delicate task of pressing  the button that would signal a new marker, another measurement by which the existence of the human race will be tracked, judged, categorized, labeled and rated.

This is all okay by me, as I have slipped into the dubious existence of days long gone by, perhaps even 1972, when Scott Colburn, Mark Menzell and the Barich brothers wore puffy down parkas, Pivetta hiking boots over the ankle, threadbare Levi's, stolen Vuarnets and were never, ever on time for anything.

Another number, this one denoting the 366th consecutive day and thereby triggering a change in the measurement known as a "year", is advancing forward. A meaningless demarcation, perhaps. Another checkmark in the box. A chance to reflect, let bygones be bygones, and screw up various official documents for the next few months.

Let's be nice to each other, make sweet of it, and maybe even pretend that this will be the best year yet.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

(...and you thought I would say something puerile and sophomoric like "Happy Nude Queer". Well, I'm giving up poor taste in OhFourteen, which is also the year manatees will learn to fly.)

Jeb

Git yer copy today and be a life hacker!